Most of the key words commonly used to describe governments—words such as monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy—are of Greek or Roman origin. They have been current for more than 2,000 years and have not yet exhausted their usefulness. This suggests that humankind has not altered very much since they were coined; however, such verbal and psychological uniformity must not be allowed to hide the enormous changes in society and politics that have occurred. The earliest analytical use of the term monarchy, for example, occurred in ancient Athens, in the dialogues of Plato (c. 428–c. 348 bce), but even in Plato’s time the term was not self-explanatory. There was a king in Macedonia and a king in Persia, but the two societies, and therefore their institutions, were radically different. To give real meaning to the word monarchy in those two instances, it would be necessary to investigate their actual political and historical contexts. Any general account of monarchy required then, and requires today, an inquiry as to what circumstances have predisposed societies to adopt monarchy and what have led them to reject it. So it is with all political terms.

Primitive government

Agricultural society

So long as humans were few, there was hardly any government. The division of function between ruler and ruled occurred only, if at all, within the family. The largest social groups, whether tribes or villages, were little more than loose associations of families, in which every elder or family head had an equal voice. Chieftains, if any, had strictly limited powers; some tribes did without chieftains altogether. This prepolitical form of social organization may still be found in some regions of the world, such as the Amazonian jungle in South America or the upper Nile River valley in Africa.

The rise of agriculture began to change that state of affairs. In the land of Sumer (in what is now Iraq) the invention of irrigation necessitated grander arrangements. Control of the flow of water down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers had to be coordinated by a central authority, so that fields could be watered downstream as well as farther up. It became necessary also to devise a calendar, so as to know when the spring floods might be expected. As those skills evolved, society evolved with them. In early Sumer, it is reasonable to assume, the heads of the first cities, which were little more than enlarged villages, only gradually assumed the special attributes of monarchy—the rule of one—and the village council only gradually undertook a division of labour, so that some specialized as priests and others as warriors, farmers, or tax gatherers (key figures in every civilized society). As organization grew more complex, so did religion: an elaborate system of worship seemed necessary to propitiate the quite elaborate family of gods who, it was hoped, would protect the city from attack, from natural disaster, and from any questioning of the political arrangements deemed necessary by the ruler group.

The earliest cities for which there exist records appeared around the mouths of the Tigris and …

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Unfortunately—but, given human nature, inevitably—the young cities of Sumer quarrelled over the distribution of the rivers’ water, and their wealth excited the greed of nomads outside the still comparatively small area of civilization (a word deriving from the Latin word for city, civitas). War, perhaps the most potent of all forces of historical change, announced its arrival, and military leadership became at least as important an element of kingship as divine sanction. It was to remain so throughout the long history of monarchy: whenever kings have neglected their military duties, they have endangered their thrones. The wars of Sumer also laid bare another imperative of monarchy—the drive for empire, arising from the need to defend and define frontiers by extending them and the need to find new means to pay for troops and weapons, whether by the plunder of an enemy or by the conquest of new lands, or both.

The history of Old World monarchy, and indeed of civilization, was to consist largely of variations on the patterns mentioned above for four or five millennia. Trade contacts carried the principles of civilization to Egypt and to India (China, like the pre-Columbian societies of the Americas, seems to have evolved independently). And everywhere, once the social order was established, the problem of defending it became paramount. Although the broad zone of civilization spread steadily, so that by the reign of the Roman emperorTrajan (98–117 ce) there was a continuous band of civilized societies from Britain to the China Sea, it was always at risk from the barbarian nomads who roamed the great steppelands of central Eurasia. These nomads had retained the loose and simple institutions of primitive societies, but they had in other ways evolved as rapidly and successfully as the cities themselves (and partly under the cities’ influence). The steppe was horse country, and, armed with bows and arrows, the barbarians of all epochs were marvelously swift and deadly light cavalry. They fought constantly among themselves for pasturage, and the losers were forever being driven west, south, and east, where they often overcame any defenses that the farms and cities of civilization could muster against them.

Yet the nomads’ military challenge was never sufficient to overturn civilization entirely. Either the invaders would overrun the settled lands and then adopt civilized customs, or the frontier defenses would prove strong enough to hold them off. There were even long periods of peace, when the barbarian threat was negligible. It was at such times that the spontaneous ingenuity of humankind had greatest play, in politics as in everything else. But it is noteworthy that, in the end, what may be described as the ancient norm always reasserted itself, whether in Europe, the Middle East, India, or China. Military crises—barbarian invasions, civil wars, or war between competing polities—recurred, necessitating the strengthening of government.

The effort to secure a measure of peace and prosperity required the assertion of authority over vast distances, the raising of large armies, and the gathering of taxes to pay for them. Those requirements in turn fostered literacy and numeracy and the emergence of what later came to be called bureaucracy—government by officials. Bureaucraticimperialism emerged again and again and spread with civilization. Barbarian challenge occasionally laid it low but never for very long. When one city or people rose to hegemony over its neighbours, it simply incorporated their bureaucracy into its own. Sumer and Babylon were conquered by Assyria; Assyria was overthrown by the Medes of Persia, in alliance with a resurgent Babylon and nomadic Scythians; the empire of the Persians was overthrown by Alexander the Great (356–323 bce) of Macedonia; the Macedonian successor states were conquered by Rome, which was in due course supplanted in the Middle East and North Africa by the Islamic Caliphate of Baghdad. Conquerors came and went, but life for their subjects, whether peasants or townspeople, was not much altered by anything they did, as long as the battles happened elsewhere.

Nevertheless, from time to time experiments were made, for no monarchy had the resources to rule all its subjects directly. So long as they paid tribute punctually, local rulers and local communities were perforce left to govern themselves. Even if they did not pay, the effort required to mount a military operation at a distance from the imperial centre was so great that only in exceptional circumstances would it be undertaken, and even then it might not succeed, as the kings of Persia found when they launched punitive expeditions from Asia Minor against mainland Greece at the beginning of the 5th century bce. Thus, in normal times the inhabitants of the borderlands had extensive freedom of action.

Although civilization, as its advantages became clear, spread west and northwest out of Asia, bureaucratic monarchy could not easily follow it. The sea was becoming a historical factor as important as the steppe and the great irrigable rivers. Tyre and Sidon, maritime cities of Phoenicia (modern Lebanon), had long exploited their coastal situation, not only to remain independent of the landward empires but also to push across the sea, even beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, in quest of trade. Their daughter cities—Carthage, Utica, and Cádiz—were the first colonies, but primitive communications made it impossible for Phoenicia to rule them.

Greece

The city-state

The Phoenician example was followed by the Greeks, originally Indo-European nomads who gradually made their way south to the Aegean and there took to the sea. They built on the achievements of earlier peoples and even took over the first bureaucratic monarchy to appear on European soil, the Minoan civilization of the island of Crete, which succumbed to invaders from the Greek mainland about 1450 bce. Other invaders from the north overthrew the mainland kingdoms of Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos about 1200 bce. The Dark Age of Greece that then began lasted until the 8th century bce, by which time the Greeks had not only adapted the Phoenician alphabet and begun to found overseas colonies but also brought nearly to maturity the city-state (polis in Greek, from which the term politics derives). This form of government was the great political invention of classical antiquity. (See alsoancient Greek civilization.)

The city-state was made possible by Mediterranean geography, which is such that every little fishing village had to be able to defend itself against attack from land or sea, for outside help could not reach it easily. A person’s dependence on his community, for physical as well as economic survival, was therefore obvious and complete. The city had first claim on his labour and loyalty, a claim that was usually freely recognized. It was this reality that led Aristotle (who himself came from just such a small commonwealth, Stageira) to define humans as political animals. In addition, coastal mountain ranges made it difficult for any community in Greece to dominate more than a few square miles of land. Therefore, in the Greek world (which by c. 600 bce stretched from the coasts of Asia Minor to what is now southern France) there were dozens of centres of government. The term city-state expresses the double aspect of those small settlements.

Each city-state was, on the one hand, an economic, cultural, and religious organization; on the other hand, each was a self-governing community capable, in theory, of maintaining absolute independence by enlisting all its adult male inhabitants as soldiers. It was like a business association and also like an encamped army. (In many respects, the city of Sparta actually was an encamped army.) Freedom was defined as the right and ability of every city to govern itself. What freedom meant for the internal order of such cities was fiercely and often bloodily debated for more than two centuries.

Although it was a fact of the Greek world that geography deterred the rise of an empire to federate and control all the cities, a few nevertheless rose to imperial greatness. Those cities engaged in profitable trade across the sea, as their Phoenician predecessors had done. Athens, for example, exported olive oil, silver, and pottery, and the profits of that trade enabled it to build a great navy and formidable city walls. Athenian ships defeated Persia (480 bce) and won a small empire in the Aegean. The combination of ships and walls enabled Athens long to defy and nearly to defeat Sparta, its chief rival among the Greek cities. Even after Sparta’s triumph at the end of the Peloponnesian War (404 bce), Athens remained an independent, sovereign state until its defeat by Philip II of Macedonia at the battle of Chaeronea (338 bce). In short, during the period of its prime Athens was free to make what experiments it liked in the realm of government, and to that period are owed not just the first example of successful democracy in world history but also the first investigations in political thought.

Monarchy, oligarchy, democracy

No Athenian believed that he had anything to learn from the bureaucratic monarchies of the East, which were incompatible with Greek notions of citizenship. If self-defense necessitated that every citizen be required to fight for his polis when called on, in return each had to be conceded some measure of respect and autonomy—personal freedom. To protect that freedom, government was necessary: anarchy had no attractions for any Greek except perhaps Diogenes, the father of Cynicphilosophy.

The central question of politics, then, was the distribution of power among the citizens. Was Greek freedom best preserved and defined by the rule of the few or by that of the many? On the whole, the great names favoured aristocracy—the rule of the best. Plato believed that the object of politics was virtue and that only a few would ever thoroughly understand the science by which virtue could be attained and that those trained few should rule as “philosopher kings.” Aristotle, his pupil, seems to have put the cultivation of the intellect among the highest human goods, and he believed—quite reasonably, given the limited economic resources then available—that this fruit of civilization could be gathered only among a leisure class supported by the labours of the many. In return for their leisure, the gentry should agree to sacrifice some of their time to the tedious business of governing, which only they would be sufficiently disinterested and well-informed to do successfully. Neither of these apologies for oligarchy had any success in practice. The champions of democracy carried the day, at least in Athens and its allied cities. In return for playing their parts as soldiers or sailors, ordinary Athenians insisted on controlling the government.

Detail of a Roman copy (2nd century bce) of a Greek alabaster portrait bust of Aristotle, c. …

The result was imperfect but impressive. The people were misled by demagogues; they were intolerant enough to put Plato’s master, Socrates, to death; they were envious of all personal distinction; and of their three great wars (against Persia, Sparta, and Macedonia) they lost two. Furthermore, passionate devotion to the idea that Athens was the greatest of all cities, the school of Greece and the wonder of civilization, misled them into basing their society in large part on slave labour, into wanton imperial adventure abroad, and into denying Athenian citizenship to all who were not born into it (even Aristotle), however much they contributed to the city’s greatness and however much more they might have done. The foundations of Athenian democracy were narrow, shallow, and fragile. But to say all this is only to say that the city could not entirely shake off the traditions of its past. Its achievement was the more remarkable for that. Seldom since has civilized humanity surpassed democratic Athens, and until the last the city was satisfactorily governed by law and by popular decision. It owed its fall less to any flaw than to the overwhelming force that was mounted against it.

Far to the north of Hellas proper, a new power arose. Greek civilization had slowly trained and tamed the wild people of Macedonia. Their king, Philip II, forged them into a powerful army, and he and his son Alexander the Great then seized the opportunity open to them. History and geography made it impossible for the Greek cities to hang together, so they were hanged separately. It seemed as if the city-state had been but a transient expedient. Henceforward Athens and Sparta would take their orders from foreign conquerors—first Macedonia, then Rome.

Alexander the Great, marble bust, 2nd–1st century bce; in the British Museum, London.

Rome

The republic

But, as it turned out, the city-state had barely begun to display its full political potential. To the west, two non-Greek cities, Carthage and Rome, began to struggle for mastery, and, after the defeat of the Carthaginian general Hannibal at Zama (202 bce), Rome emerged as the strongest state in the Mediterranean.

The Greeks did not know how to classify Rome. The Greek historian Polybius, who chronicled Rome’s rise, suggested that its constitution was such a success because it was a judicious blend of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. The Romans, a conservative, practical people, showed what they thought of such abstractions by speaking only of an unanalyzed “public thing”—res publica—and thus gave a new word, republic, to politics. With this focus the patriotism of the city-state reached its greatest intensity. The Romans were deeply attached to their traditions, all of which taught the same lesson. For example, the legendary hero Gaius Mucius Scaevola gave his right hand to the flames to prove that there was nothing a Roman would not endure for his city, which therefore would never be defeated. That passionate devotion to Rome’s survival was tested again and again in war. All the tales of early Rome turn on battle. With dour persistence the peasants who had gathered on the seven hills beside the river Tiber resisted every invader, fought back after every defeat, learned from all their mistakes, and even, however reluctantly and belatedly, modified their political institutions to meet the new needs of the times as they arose.

Polybius was right: power in Rome was indeed shared among the people, the aristocracy (embodied in the Senate), and the consuls—the executive officers of the republic who had replaced the kings. The claims of the many and the few were fought out at election time, when the world’s first clearly identifiable political parties appeared. Until the republic’s decline, the results of elections were universally respected, and the triumphant alliance of the few and the many against the world was proclaimed in the letters blazoned on the city’s buildings and battle standards, “SPQR,” for Senatus populusque Romanus (“The Senate and the people of Rome”).

Like Athenian democracy, this system worked well for a long time, and, if the chief Athenian legacy was the proof that politics could be understood and debated logically and that under the right conditions democracy could work, Rome proved that the political process of competition for office and the public discussion of policy were valuable things in themselves.

Nevertheless, the Roman Republic had been forged in a grim world. Wars, always supposedly in self-defense, had gradually extended Rome’s power over Italy. It is not surprising that what impressed the world most about the city was its military strength rather than its political institutions, even though the two were intimately related. As the weakness of Rome’s neighbours became apparent, the Romans began to believe in their mission to rule, “to spare the conquered and war down the proud,” as their greatest poet, Virgil, put it. Military strength, in short, led to military adventurism. By the 1st century bce, Rome, having become a naval power as well as a military one, had conquered the whole Mediterranean basin and much of its hinterland. The strains of empire building made themselves felt. The Roman armies, no longer composed of citizens temporarily absent from the plow or the workshop but of lifetime professionals, were now loyal to their generals rather than to the state, and those generals brought on civil war as they competed to turn their foreign conquests into power at home. The population of Rome swelled, but economic growth could not keep pace, so many citizens became paupers dependent on a public dole. The aristocrats appointed to govern the provinces saw their postings chiefly as opportunities to get rich quickly by pillaging their unfortunate subjects. The republic could not solve those and other problems and was in the end superseded by the monarchy of Augustus.

The empire

The bedrock of the emperor Augustus’s power was his command of the legions with which he had defeated all his rivals, but he was a much better politician than he was a general, and he knew that naked political power is as insecure as it is expensive. He reduced the military establishment as much as was prudent, laboured to turn the revolutionary faction that had supported his bid for power into a respectable new ruling class, and proclaimed the restoration of the republic in 27 bce. But not even Augustus could make the restoration real. The safety of the state, questions of war and peace, and most of the business of governing the empire were now in the hands of a monarch. Consequently, there was not enough for the Senate to do, and Augustus never went so far as to restore genuinely free elections or the organs of popular government. He kept the population of the city happy with chariot races, gladiatorial contests, and the dole of bread. Nevertheless, he could not give up the attempt to legitimize his regime. Like earlier monarchs elsewhere, he called in the aid of religion, even though the religion of Rome was as republican as its constitution. Later emperors made their own divinity a tenet of the public faith. Later still, they imposed Christianity as the sole legitimate and official religion of the empire, and they exploited the power and prestige of the church to buttress their own authority.

For four centuries the resemblance between Rome and the bureaucratic Eastern monarchies steadily increased. Roman nationalism, Roman traditionalism, and Roman law survived as legacies that posterity would one day claim, and, if nobody much believed in the constitutional shams of Augustus’s day, the example of his constitutional monarchy was to prove potent at a much later period.

The age of the city-state was at last drawing to a close. The emperor Caracalla (died 217) extended Roman citizenship to all subjects of the empire so that he could tax them more heavily. The demands of the imperial administration began to bankrupt the cities, which had previously prospered as the local organs of government under Rome. New barbarian attacks threw the empire onto the defensive, and in 410 ce the city of Rome itself was captured and sacked by the Visigoths. About 65 years later the last Roman emperor in the West was deposed, and thenceforward the caesars reigned only in Constantinople and the East.

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The government of a modern nation, or country, is an organization that does many things. It defends the country from outside enemies. It keeps order within the country. And it provides services for its people. In return, the people of the country must pay money called taxes to the government. They also must obey the government’s rules, which are called laws. States and cities have governments, too.

Any group of people living together in a country, state, city, or local community has to live by certain rules. The system of rules and the people who make and administer them is known as a government. Especially at the national level, a government can be a massive system that encompasses a great number of institutions and leaders. A national government typically includes a president or prime minister, a legislature or parliament, courts, a civil or public service, and armed forces, among many other components. The set of formal legal institutions that make up a government is sometimes called a political system.

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